Encouraging the Participation of Female Students in STEM fields - the Congressional Hearings

Yesterday the Subcommittee on Research and Science Education held hearings on encouraging the interest of girls in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) in primary and secondary schools. The subcommittee Chairman Daniel Lipinski noted that skilled scientists and engineers play an important role in keeping the United States competitive for the 21st century:

We have heard time and time again that, as a nation, we are not producing enough scientists and engineers for the increasing number of technical jobs of the future. We need to make sure that we have the scientific and technical workforce we need if we are to remain a leader in the global economy, and it is not possible to do this without developing and encouraging all the talent in our nation. We must have women engineers, computer scientists, and physicists. By broadening the STEM pipeline to include more women and other under-represented groups, we can strengthen our workforce.

Some of the testimony highlights:

Dr. Alan Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) testified that K-12 science education standards are too low for all students and expectations are low for students from groups that are underrepresented in STEM fields. He also pointed out that the is a wide difference in percentage of women participating in different fields of science and engineering, and notes that the participation of women drops significantly at the faculty level.

Although the story of women in STEM fields is one of tremendous gains over the past 40 years, it is a bittersweet story that is coupled with uneven progress and sometimes loss of ground—a discipline-specific program here, a department there, but seldom an institution-wide effort

But he didn't just point out the problems - he discussed a number of AAAS programs and made some suggestions for what the federal could do:

Many researchers and program managers believe that STEM fields are not being “marketed” appropriately to girls and young women. While President Obama has articulated specific challenges where science and engineering must play a role, it is also important to provide materials (and opportunities for engagement) that demonstrate how STEM connects to addressing the real world problems we face as a nation and as a world. Consider, for example, the areas of engineering where the distribution of bachelor’s degrees in environmental and biomedical engineering awarded to women approaches that of men.

Many believe that a new call to serve for both young men and young women needs to link the critical role of education in STEM fields with the opportunity to address global concerns such as food security, clean water, climate change, clean sources of energy, and infectious diseases and other health issues. Students need examples of people who are doing this work today as well as access to opportunities for experiential learning. It is important in such efforts to prominently include women as well as men.

The "marketing" of science can be a controversial issue*, since it conjures up images of tricky advertising tactics that value "sales" more than accuracy. It's not clear to me that the gendered assumption that girls and women would be more interested in science if they understood it's role in taking care of people and the planet is an accurate one. It certainly doesn't explain why women who are interested enough in science to obtain their Ph.D.s seem to be dropping out of academia.

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Next up was Dr. Marcia Brumit Kropf, COO of Girls Incorporated**. In her testimony, Kropf points out that the gap between girls and boys in math and physical sciences has closed significantly over the past 30 years. Her suggestion (and the approach of Girls Incorporated) is informal science education:

Girls Inc. Eureka! is a four-week summer STEM and sports camp program for girls 12-15 held on a college campus. In Alameda County, CA, girls in Eureka!, who were predominantly urban, minority girls, increased their math course-taking plans, while control group girls’ plans to take math decreased. Second-year Eureka! girls’ math and science course‐taking plans almost doubled. Their interest in science careers increased, and the percentage of girls whose wish for the following school year was “to do well/be on the honor roll,” increased from 38 percent to 66 percent.

Alarmingly, however, this study also seemed to indicate that being away from school had a positive impact on girls—both Eureka! and control girls—in terms of wanting to do math and science. For most, being back in school tended to decrease that interest.

Part of the problem is, not surprisingly, sexism:

Girls Inc. sponsors eight FIRST Robotics Lego League teams, with support from Motorola. The Girls Inc. teams often find themselves the only all-girl teams in the competitions (except of course when there are teams sponsored by the Girl Scouts). But on the co-ed teams, staff observed that it was always the boys who were operating the robots. In fact, on one occasion when I had the pleasure of speaking with some members of Robot Chicks Union, a group of female FIRST Robotics competitors, they complained that on co-ed teams they were actually assigned roles such as marketing and bringing the snacks for their team. This phenomenon plays out in classrooms as well, where girls are too often relegated to supporting roles, such as recording notes, as they watch boys perform the experiments and work with equipment.

I don't think it's surprising that girls with such experiences wouldn't end up being particularly interested in pursuing science as a career.

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The testimony continued with Dr. Sandra Hanson, Professor of Sociology at The Catholic University of America whose most recent book is Swimming Against the Tide: African American Girls and Science Education. She testified that her research has shown that girls start out with similar interest and abilities in science as boys, but as they get older - especially during the high school years - enrollment of girls in STEM classes drops and their attitude towards science becomes more negative. Girls do better in single-sex classrooms, it turns out, and she agreed with Dr. Kropf as to the value of out-of-school informal science learning experiences. She recommended the use of the National Center for Education Research's practice guide "Encouraging Girls in Math and Science" in developing classroom programs.

Hanson also pointed out that STEM isn't just a male culture, but a predominantly white male culture, and that girls and women of different races and ethnic backgrounds can have very different experiences pursuing science and mathematics.

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Barbara Bogue is director of the Penn State Women in Engineering Program and co-founder and co-director of the Society of Women Engineers' Assessing Women and Men in Engineering Project (SWE-AWE). She pointed out in her testimony that science and engineering have different challenges. There is also a lot of variation in the representation of women in engineering from field to field.

For example, 2006 National Science Foundation (NSF) statistics show that women received almost 50 percent of science and engineering bachelor’s degrees in 2005- 06.

Taken on face value, these statistics make it look like there is no problem. If we break out engineering, however, the percentage of women receiving degrees is a very low 18 percent. And even within engineering, there are great variations. Environmental, bio and chemical engineering—all fields related to biological sciences—have high percentages of women at 40 percent, 37 percent and 34 percent respectively. Unfortunately, these are relatively small disciplines in terms of numbers enrolled. Mechanical and electrical engineering, on the other hand, are disciplines that traditionally have the largest populations of students, but have very low percentages of women at 11 percent and 12 percent respectively. Computer engineering, another field critical to national competitiveness, has only 11 percent.

She notes that differences between fields need to be taken into account when developing programs to attract women to those fields.

One of the findings of the SWE AWE is that women do not pursue engineering because they are turned off by the culture of engineering education, not because they lack interest or talent.

Much research shares common findings that women who are equally prepared academically as men when they enter engineering leave engineering or science with higher GPAs than their male counterparts who leave, having found less of a sense of community and citing that they have encountered poor teaching. Surveys of students leaving engineering or science, including surveys developed and implemented by SWE AWE, find that students who leave are less involved in discipline-related activities and fail to develop a sense of community.

AWE results and other findings belie the postulation that women do not pursue engineering because they are just not interested or don’t have the talent. Rather, they indicate that women who have the talent and interest are being turned off by how the discipline is presented. Women’s high school preparation and GPAs once in college are comparable to men’s. In fact, in our recent research females show significantly higher intentions to persist in engineering than their male counterparts. These results show that we don’t need to fix the women; we need to fix environments in which they fail to thrive.

Increasing the participation of women in engineering fields will require changes in the education system to make it more welcoming - or at least less off-putting.

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Finally, Cherryl T. Thomas, president and founder of engineering consulting firm Ardmore Associates, spoke about her own path to a career in science and engineering. Unlike most of the other witnesses, she hasn't studied women in STEM, rather she based her suggestions on her own experiences starting out as one of the few women working for the City of Chicago's Department of Water and Sewers in the early 1970s.

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Read all the hearing witness statements, which have attached statistics and citations to support their discussions.

Watch the hearings (requires Real Player)

* see, for example, the discussion of the proposed selling of science to the public in Unscientific America (which I blogged about elsewhere)

** Girls Incorporated has published fact sheets on "Girls and Science, Math, and Engineering" (pdf) and "Girls and Information Technology" (pdf), among other topics.

(via Fairer Science)

Image (left to right): Alan Leshner, Marcia Brumit Kropf, Sandra Hanson, Barbara Bogue, Cherryl Thomas.

Tags: women in science, women in engineering, education

Eugenie Scott: Battling for Science Education

Sometimes I get tired. I have a bunch of half-finished posts that all seem like variations on the same negative themes: women are falling behind, left behind, and dropping out. It's the same reports and same arguments over and over again. I just haven't been that inspired. But I realized that what I needed was something positive to write about. Fortunately, Eugenie Scott has provided me an inspiring subject.

Eugenie Scott can remember well when she first became interested in anthropology:

I must have been around nine or 10 years old when my older sister brought home a college-level textbook in anthropology. I was something of a compulsive reader even then, and I casually picked up one of my sister’s books and flipped through the pages.

In the middle of the book was a set of plates showing primitive-looking people with big brows, prow-like noses and receding chins. They were kind of like her boyfriend of the time actually, an observation that was not appreciated. But I was gobsmacked by the reconstructions of these early fossil humans – Cro-Magnons, Neanderthals, Peking Man and the like.

This is where we started. These were the great-great-great-umpty-ump-great grandfathers of us all. It was stunning to a 10-year-old. The title of the book was Anthropology. I decided then that I wanted to be an anthropologist when I grew up.

She wasn't actually taught anything about evolution in her science classes until she got to college, but she never lost interest in anthropology. After getting her bachelor and masters degrees from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee she headed to graduate school at the University of Missouri.

It was as a graduate student in physical anthropology that Scott first became aware of oxymoronically-named "creation science" in 1971. It may not have seemed significant at the time, but that started her on a path towards her current position as the Executive Director of the Oakland, California-based National Center for Science Education (NCSE), which works to keep evolution in public school science education. Over the years Scott collected creationist literature, at first as a mostly academic curiosity. It was while teaching at the University of Kentucky that she became involved in a fight to keep creationism out of the Lexington public schools. From that effort the NCSE was formed in 1981, and Scott was made Executive Director of the organization in 1987.

While she has accumulated a number of awards and honors over the years, it's not too surprising that her efforts have come under fire. As Chris Mooney has pointed out, she has has to fend off criticism from both creationists and science advocates:

As this evidence suggests, Scott is regularly under fire from the culture war combatants on both sides. Not only does NCSE have to monitor the endless permutations of the creationists, who are constantly coming up with new ploys for attacking evolution. It also has to deal with the pugilistic evolutionists who want to make this battle about the truth or falsehood of religious belief, rather than the truth or falsehood of what science discovers about the world. In this gauntlet, Scott has remained an eloquent defender of the view that people of science and people of religion can and must work together to solve conflicts—and indeed, this is the best and only way forward.

Her position seems reasonable to me, and the NCSE's efforts seem to have been effective. I'm thankful that Scott has devoted so much of her career to fighting this fight. Quality science education from elementary through high school is necessary to cultivate the upcoming generations of American scientists.

More information about Eugenie Scott:

• Wikipedia: Eugenie Scott
  
• 1999: Bruce Alberts Award for Excellence in Science Education from the American Society for Cell Biology
• 2001-2003: President of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists
  
• 2002: Outstanding Service Award from the American Institute of Biological Sciences
  
• 2006: Anthropology in the Media Award from the American Anthropological Association
  
• 2009 Scientific American 10: Guiding Science for Humanity
  

  Eugenie Scott has emerged as one of the most prominent advocates for keeping evolution an integral part of the curriculum in public schools in her role as head of the nonprofit National Center for Science Education (NCSE).

• 2009: awarded the very first Stephen J. Gould Prize bu the Society for the Study of Evolution.

Dr. Scott is a gifted communicator and public intellectual. She is a frequent guest on radio and television shows, and an eloquent spokeswoman for science. Her writings have illuminated the process of science to thousands, and her books have exposed the efforts of many groups in our society to hobble and undermine the teaching of science to our younger generation. The organization she helped create far transcends the considerable reach of her own voice, vastly amplifying her impact on public understanding.

(If you are interested in helping defend the teaching of evolution, download "Voices for Evolution" and check out the NCSE's resource page.)

Tags: women in science, Eugenie Scott, NCSE

Why Girls Don't Like Math

A recent episode of Your Voice ("helping parents help their children succeed in school") on Ontario Public Television station TVO took a look at "Why Girls Don't Like Math". The program featured a discussion between Patricia Campbell of Fairer Science, Fiona Dunbar, Lecturer in Math at the University of Waterloo, chair of the university's Women in Mathematics Committee and founder of the Canadian Women in Math Association; and Grade 8 teacher Lukrica Prugo, who has taught an all-girls class for two years. Host Cheryl Johnson set out the background:

According to the experts we spoke with on Your Voice, eight out of ten future jobs will require math skills. This does not bode well for girls, since most girls leave math in the dust after high school, if not before. It's not that girls are not good at math. The most recent EQAO scores from the Education Quality Accountability Office in Ontario show that girls and boys in Grades 3 and 6 achieve at the same levels in math. However, when asked in the EQAO survey about math, far fewer girls say they like math, fewer say they find math relevant, and many more say they need help with math. So.....girls are good at math, but they think they're not.

It's an interesting discussion - well worth watching if you are interested in math education.

Watch "Why Girls Don't Like Math".

Tags: mathematics, education, girls

Mother-Daughter Scientist Club

The Mother and Daughter Science Club is an interesting-sounding idea:

The Mother And Daughter Science Club brings four to six pairs of mothers and [4th or 5th grade] daughters (or daughters and another significant adult female) together to do hands-on science experiments and activities, to learn about women scientists throughout history, and to be introduced to gender-related issues that can reinforce positive attitudes in the girls and their mothers about math and science.

Publisher ACI lets you download the M&DSC Facilitation Manual for free. It includes suggested activities including experiments, skits, history segments and some not-particularly exciting word puzzles. It also has some additional background information for adults who want to encourage girls in science and mathematics. Glancing through the program, the suggested activities seem pretty enjoyable, and they wouldn't require any special training on the part of the mothers, or any difficult-to-obtain equipment.

One drawback is that they don't include any biology-related projects - that's probably because most biology experiments would require either longer than a single meeting to complete, or specialized equipment, like a microscope. And to be successful I would think a club like this would need a leader who is both comfortable with the science and is a good organizer. That said, I think this could be a great way for moms and daughters to spend time together in a fun and educational way.

And it's only fair to mention that the reason why ACI gives the manual away is that they also want to sell you a copy of The Scientist Within You, a series of companion books which has biographies of women scientists, experiments and other activities.

Tags: Mother-Daughter Scientist Club, science education

Why Science is Important

Alom Shaha, a science teacher at Camden School for Girls, asked scientists and educators to explain why they think science is important. He got a great range of responses, which he has compiled into a documentary. Many of the contributors seem to have moved from research to writing and teaching - I'm not sure that's indicative of anything other than the fact that educators are more likely to have both heard about the project and be comfortable with talking on video.

Some of the women in science who contributed:

• Kat Arney, "ex-scientist" working as a Science Information Officer at Cancer Research UK
• Robin Bell, Senior Research Scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.
• Susan Blackmore, frelance writer and Visiting Lecturer at the University of the West of England, Bristol. Blackmore is best known for her theory of memetics.
  
• Rosie Coates, PhD student in chemistry at University College London.
• Beulah Garner, natural history curator at the Horniman Museum and Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society.
• Elaine Greaney, rocket scientist.
• Maya Hawes: a 12-year-old student
• Ann Lingard, novelist, former scientist, and founder of SciTalk - a site that helps writers connect with scientists.
• Becky Parker, Head of Physics at the Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys. She's a former lecturer in physics, a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, and has been awarded an MBE for her services to science.
• Jennifer Rohn, cell biologist and founder of LabLit.com.
• Rhian Salmon, PhD in Atmospheric Chemistry. She currently works as Education and Outreach Coordinator for the International Polar Year
• Tara Shears, particle physicist.
• Anna Smajdor, lecturer in Ethics at the University of East Anglia. She is particularly interested in the ethical aspects of science, medicine and technology.

Here's the final film (if you don't see it embedded below, click the link):

Why is Science Important? from Alom Shaha on Vimeo.

Tags: Why Science is Important, education

Celebrating Ada Lovelace Day: Women Excelling in Technology

In case you've forgotten, today - March 24 - is Ada Lovelace Day. I and over 1500 other bloggers have pledged to post about "women excelling in technology". I had a hard time deciding whether I should profile someone who works on the business end of tech, or if someone in academia would be more interesting. In the end, I took the easy way out by including one of each: Silicon Valley CEO Carol Bartz on the business side, and Georgia Tech professor Amy Bruckman on the academic side. They are from two different generations, and are involved very different aspects of the technology world. Both demonstrate that women can be - and are - successful in technology.

Technology Business: Carol Bartz

In January of this year Carol Bartz was thrust into the international limelight when she was named the new Chief Executive Officer of internet giant Yahoo! While many people outside of tech world may not have heard her name before then, she is certainly not new to the industry; from 1992-2006 she was CEO of Autodesk, the giant software company that produces AutoCAD and other design software, and she served as their Chairman of the Board until this year. Before heading up Autodesk she was CFO at Sun Microsystems. She's clearly no stranger to Silicon Valley.

But her career trajectory could have been very different. In high school she was a cheerleader and the homecoming queen - and one of only two girls taking physics and advanced math classes. She originally intended to major in math in college, but took a computer class and fell in love. She told More.com:

Well, the first time I wrote a program, I just loved it," she says, sighing at the memory. "I absolutely loved it. We had to write a program that would add up all of the license plate numbers in the state of Missouri. Ah! I remember that so clearly."

This was 1966 and she the small college she was attending didn't offer the courses she was interesting in taking. She transferred to the University of Wisconsin at Madison to major in computer science, paying her way through school working as a cocktail waitress (a detail that all the articles about her like to emphasize). Her first major job after graduation was at 3M, where she ran into a big wall: she had entered an industry where women weren't particularly welcome.

"3M was where I first realized that this corporate thing against women really existed," she says. "I was definitely singled out." In her first week, Bartz, the only woman professional in a division of 300 men, was sent to an out-of-town business meeting where everyone was assigned to share a room. When "C. Bartz" saw her room assignment, she quietly had the hotel switch her to a single room. The next morning she was met by a manager who had just, apparently, had a good look at the list. "We're going to have to let you go," he said. "You slept with somebody last night."

Bartz can laugh about it now. "They were so whacked out just because there was actually a female there," she says. "I told them I didn't sleep with anybody last night, and that I didn't know anyone there. Even so, for the next several hours, I was fired."

Bartz spent four years at 3M. But in 1976, when she requested a transfer to headquarters, "They told me to my face, 'Women don't do these jobs.' It was the first time I actually heard that," she recalls. "I'm out of here," she told them. She packed up her desk and left.

At that point Bartz could have found an industry that was more friendly to women, but she instead decided to stick it out in the high-tech business world. In retrospect, that was clearly the right choice. But even now, after decades in the industry, she is one of the few women to hold a top position. Back in 1997 she wrote:

In the country's biggest companies, there aren't many women CEOs. But more are coming up. Some are starting their own companies. It's better to be a woman in technology than in other industries, but there definitely still is a gap or a glass ceiling. It's there in a lot of subtle and some not-so-subtle ways. It starts with venture funding. It's present in the fact that there are not that many women technologists. It goes back to the fact that young girls still aren't encouraged in the math and science arena. It goes to the fact that white males are still more comfortable with white males.

And she sees the situation as largely the same today.

I wonder how many women in technology who had similar experiences to Bartz's in the early days of their careers simply decided to leave for friendlier climes. I believe that Bartz would have likely been just as successful if she had done just that. She could have been one more statistic used to show that women "chose" alternative career paths. But she persisted despite the road blocks thrown up in front of her, and has clearly demonstrated that women can be successful in the high tech business world.

More about Carol Bartz:

• Forbes: In Her Own Words: Carl Bartz: No Time to Change Others (originally published Dec. 1997)
  
• Business 2.0: The Survivor: She fought off cancer, then turned a struggling maker of design software into an industry giant. Is there anything that tough-talking Autodesk CEO Carol Bartz can't do? (Dec. 1, 2004)
• More: The World According to Carol Bartz (June 2006)
  (This is a very detailed profile)
  
• Valleywag: Carol Bartz, the Woman Everyone but Yahoo Forgot (Jan. 15, 2009)
  (I know it's essentially a gossip blog, but it's depressing that the second comment on a post that talks about her accomplishments and management style is noting that she recently lost weight. Why does that matter?)
  
• The Economist: One tough Yahoo! Life has tested Carol Bartz far more than even running Yahoo! will (Jan. 15, 2009)
  
• Business Week: Yahoo's Bartz Shows Who's Boss (Feb. 26, 2009)
  

Technology as an Educational Tool: Amy Bruckman

Just two years after earning her Ph.D. from the Epistemology and Learning Group at the MIT Media Lab, Amy Bruckman's work at Georgia Tech caught the eye of Technology Review, which named her a "1999 Young Innovator". In their profile of her research, they described how she was developing online communities as a tool for education.

As a graduate student, Bruckman founded an online community for new-media researchers called MediaMOO,as well as a MOO for children called MOOSE Crossing. Bruckman has undertaken "the most notable MOO research in education," says Aaron Tornberg, an educational technology researcher at the University of Cincinnati.

To make this possible, Bruckman had to design a new interface, as well as a new programming language. Once she creates virtual communities, Bruckman doffs her engineer’s cap, puts on her anthropologist hat, and studies how the online environment influences the interactions of its participants.

Online communities have blossomed (exploded?) over the past decade, and her research has followed their progress. One of her current projects is "exploring how Wikipedia actually works, conducting empirical studies of regular contributors, administrators, participants in WikiProject subgroups, and people banned from Wikipedia."

Bruckman is also helping develop new online communities, such as Science Online, which helps students learn science by writing about it, and Georgia Computes!, which aims to increase diversity in computing. She believes that such communities can be an important tool in education:

Dr. Bruckman's research applies the "constructionist" philosophy of education--learning through design and construction activities on personally meaningful projects--to the design of online communities. The Internet, she asserts, has a unique potential to make constructionist learning scalable and sustainable in real-world settings because it makes it easy to provide social support for learning and teaching. In electronic learning communities, participants can help motivate and support one-another's activities, "thereby scaffolding the project-based learning process."

I very much like the idea, mostly because I think that's how I learn best.

Bruckman's approach to technology is very different from that of Bartz, but I think that both clearly illustrate that women and technology go together quite well.

More about Amy Bruckman:

• Wikipedia: Amy S. Bruckman
• Center for Children & Technology: Georgia Tech University Professor, Bruckman, Wins 2002 Jan Hawkins Award
  
• Technology Review TR100: Amy Bruckman (1999)
• Wired: Bringing Society to Cyberspace (2002)

You can read more Ada Lovelace Day posts here.

Tags: AdaLovelaceDay09, Carol Bartz, Amy Bruckman

Diversity in Science Carnival #1

The first Diversity in Science Carnival is up at Urban Science Adventures. There are a lot of excellent posts collected there, but I wanted to specifically point to several posts about women scientists:

• Canadian Girl Postdoc in America writes about mathematician Katherine Okikolu
• Oceanographer Ashanti Pyrtle was the profiled by ScienceWoman and given a shoutout by Miriam at The Oyster's Garter
• Zuska writes about physiologist and academic leader Pamela Gunter-Smith
  
• DrugMonkey wrote about Drug Abuse Researchers Yasmin L. Hurd and Chana K. Akins
  
• Dr. Joycelyn Simpson and Dr. Patricia Bath are on Brett Trout's list of the Top 10 African American Inventors.
  

And I'm especially looking forward to the next edition:

Join us late March/early April as Diversity in Science and Scientiae celebrate Women’s History Month and salute woman achievers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Technology.

Tags: Diversity in Science

Contribute to "Why is Science Important?"

Alom Shaha teaches science at an inner city comprehensive school in London. He has started a web project to help convince his students that science is important. He says:

Anyone who knows me will confirm that I wear my passion for science on my sleeve, but I don’t think that’s enough to convince all my students that science is important. Nor do I think, like some in my profession, that the importance of science is implicit in the courses we teach, that it will somehow seep into my students’ consciousness through the sheer number of hours they spend doing “science” at school.

So, I’ve started this film and blog project in which I want to ask the question “why is science important?” to people who feel the importance of science so deeply that they have dedicated their lives to it — working scientists, science writers and, of course, science teachers. I’m making a documentary, funded by The Wellcome Trust, and running this “collective blog” as I work on the film. Bits from the blog will appear in the film and bits of the film will appear on the blog. The idea is that the two will inform and enrich each other.

Shaha already has a number of responses by scientists posted on the "Why Is Science Important?" blog. He is hoping to find more women scientists to contribute, particularly video and audio items. General entries about why science is important to you are welcome, but he is also hoping to have "at least one piece that perhaps looked at why science can be important for women in particular."

Here is an entry from Rosie Coates, a PhD student in the Department of Chemistry at University College London.


If you are interested in contributing, contact Alom Shaha.

Tags: women in science, Why is science important, video

Under The Microscope

The Feminist Press's Women Writing Science project has launched a new site, Under The Microscope. From the press release:

Sponsored by and developed with IBM, Underthemicroscope.com offers a wealth of continually updated information, including input from visitors to the web site. Currently the site provides the opportunity to post personal stories, feature and guest blogging, news about science, and links to related resources. Within the year the site will include more social networking opportunities, tips on careers, tips for parents, expanded links to science-related sites, and mentoring. Ultimately the site will provide information about internships and scholarships as well as serialized chapters of Women Writing Science publications that can be downloaded free of charge and an online book club.

[...]

Initiated by The Feminist Press at The City University of New York with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Women Writing Science will publish books of biography, fiction, history, career profiles, and how-to-survive guides presenting women as both scientists and as writers about science. Women Writing Science will also provide free teacher guides describing lesson plans and strategies for using the books in science curricula. These materials will be easily downloaded from Underthemicroscope.com .

There are already a number of entries where women answer the question "What Go You Hooked on Science?"

If you'd like to share your own story, or

Tags: Underthemicroscope.com, Feminist Press, Women Writing Science

Women in Science Link Roundup: October 19 Edition

Here are some links I've been saving in my bookmarks, which explains why some are blog posts from a year ago. Yep, way behind in my reading.

About Women Scientists

The 2008 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics was awarded to Deborah S. Jin

There is a great post on MetaFilter about the women who worked as "computers" for Edward Pickering at the Havard Collge Observatory.

Martin Griffiths wrote for LabLit about 17th century natural philosopher Margaret Cavendish: The feminism, fiction, science and philosophy of Margaret Cavendish

Hsien-Hsien Lei at Eye on DNA lists the most powerful women in biotechnology and healthcare

Wired writes that South Korean astronaut Yi Soyeon is "crazy, sexy, cool"

As a counterpoint to Newsweek's "10 hottest nerds" - who all happen to be male and mostly in the field of genomics - Jonathan Eisen listed a bunch of women in genomics who they could have included on their list.

Life in College

Samia at 49 percent writes about networking as a science undergrad

Marina at Objectify This explained how the depiction of the female reproductive system in one of her classes helped her decide to stop being a biology major:
- I Was A Teenage Feminist
- Fly Sex... and I was a Twentysomething Feminist

ScienceWoman comments on an article by Linda Sax on how men and women experience college differently

The Gender Gap

Pat at Fairer Science has the scoop on the ultimate study on the effct of gender on wages: it looked at what happens to men who changes their gender to women and women who change their gender to men. They found "women who become men (known as FTMs) do significantly better than men who become women (MTFs). MTFs in the study earned, on average, 32% less after they transitioned from male to female, even after the authors controlled for factors like education levels. FTMs earned an average of 1.5% more."

At The Intersection Sheril Kirshenbaum talks about the gender gap in response to emailer "Gabe"

Geeky Mom writes about housework and the gender gap

The Boston Globe reports on a recent study that shows the effect of culture on girls' and womens' math achievement:

The study, to be published in next month's Notices of the American Mathematical Society, identifies women of extraordinary math ability by sifting through the winners of the world's most elite math competitions. It found that small nations that nurtured female mathematicians often produced more top competitors than far larger and wealthier nations.

Lise Eliot and Susan McGee Baily had an opinion piece in USA Today about the (lack of ) gender differences in kids' brains: "Gender segregation in schools isn't the answer" (via Fairer Science)

A study from UNM looked at why many girls avoid math:

Overall, however, parent support and expectations emerged as the top support in both subjects and genders for middle- and high-school students. Also powerful for younger girls were engaging teachers and positive experiences with them.

The study confirmed that old stereotypes die slowly. Both boys and girls perceived that teachers thought boys were stronger at math and science. For boys this represented a support, while for girls it acted as a barrier.

Cognitive Daily had an excellent three part post about recent studies from the journal Psychological Science in the Publish Interest on the "science of sex differences in science and mathematics"

• Why aren't there more women in science and math? Part 1
• Why aren't there more women in science and math? Part 2
• Why aren't there more women in science and math? Part 3
  

Chris at Mixing Memory reviews a paper that looked at wstereotype threat and women in math, science and engineering

Last October Dr. Confused, who has a doctorate in aerospace engineering, had a series of guest posts on Feministe about her experiences in science, the leaky pipeline, gender roles, sexism in everyday professional lives, and being a mom.

Miscellaneous Other Posts

Life v. 3.0 hosted the September Praxis Carnival on "scientific life". The October carnival was hosted by The Other 95%.

Elle, PhD. spots more gendered science kits for kids.

Virginia Gewin writes for NatureJobs about a possible upside to the "two-body problem" of academic couples

Sylvia Ann Hewlett in the Harvard Business Publishing blog: The Glass Cliff : Are women leaders often set up to fail?

In the The Independent's Career Planning section: "Women in science and engineering: Two successful women in science give their views on how to best break the glass ceiling". The two women are Emma Sanderson, director of "value added services" at BT and Anne Miller, "one of the world's most successful female inventors"

The BDPA Foundation writes about a recent survey of Fortune 1000 STEM executives that found "women, African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields and that the result could hurt the nation as a whole." (via The Urban Scientist)

Omaha Science Examiner blogger Meg Marquardt writes about her own experience as a girl interested in science, and science communication.

A father was making a wild attempt to placate a gaggle of second grade girls. "What do you want to be when you grow up?" he asked. There was a litany of typical answers: a teacher, a mom, etc. But I stood up and proudly announced that I was going to be a scientist. The man gave me a stern look over his glasses and very firmly said, "Women ain't scientists." This was my first introduction to ignorance in science communication.

As part of the NatureJobs Podcast series:

The Source Event Part 7
Jan Bogg, Director of the Breaking Barriers Programme at the University of Liverpool, offers advice for women considering a career break, including how to stay in the loop while on maternity leave.

There's also an (old) discussion on the Naturejobs forum about the following questions:

1) Is the tendency for women to prefer people-oriented careers over science inherent or shaped by society?

2) Does anyone think “Title Nining” science is a good idea? Is it fair to punish research institutions if women just aren’t as interested in science as men are? Are there better ways of discouraging sexual discrimination, without discriminating against other successful scientists, both male and female?

Derek Low at In the Pipeline looks at a recent report in Science that followed up on the 1991 members of Yale's Molecular Biology and Biophysics PhD program. Out of 26 PhDs that year, only one of them currently has a tenured academic position.

DrugMonkey on self-perpetuating GoldOldBoys.

Green Gabbro hosted the Carnival of Feminists, and rounded up the science blog discussion about women, sexiness and the workplace.

And speaking of sexiness, Sociological Images posted a commercial featuring a woman scientist who makes a wonderful discovery - a fabulous bra!


Tags: women in science

Oprah Magazine Honors Women Promoting Science to Girls

Last spring, O, The Oprah Magazine honored 80 "trail-blazing" women as winners of their White House Leadership Project Contest. The November issue of O has profiles of those winning women, three of whom devote themselves to promoting science to girls. The winners:

Déborah Berebichez grew up in Mexico City. She studied mathematics despite being discouraged by family and friends, and earned a PhD in physics from Stanford in 2004. She then moved to New York as a postdoc in the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia. According to the article in O, she has left academia, and currently works as a consultant for the financial risk analysis firm MSCI Barra. In her spare time she has been making videos that present science to girls in a fun and friendly format. She hopes that the her series, The Science Of Everyday Life, will eventually be turned into a television show.

Related Links:

• "The science behind everyday life" at blip.tv
  
• Video interview of Deborah Berebichez at NY:MIEG
  

  "about being the first Mexican woman to graduate with a Ph.D. in Physics at Stanford University, her NSF fellowship work on a new method for delivering highly targeted wireless communications with amazing accuracy and security and her new Internet TV show about the science of everyday life."

---

Tanya Moore has a BS in mathematics from Spelman College, a Masters from the Mathematical Sciences Department at Johns Hopkins University, and PhD in biostatistics from UC Berkeley. She currently heads the Chronic Disease Prevention Program for the City of Berkeley Public Health Department.
In 2003 she established the Infinite Possibilities Conference, a math conference for minority women and girls. The first conference was held in 2005 at Spelman College. According to an article in the Oakland Tribune:

"Tanya Moore was a clear winner for all the judges," said Liz Brody, news director at the magazine, said in a statement. "We saw that she'd risen above a difficult childhood to excel against all odds, as an African-American woman, in the field of mathematics, which had us right there. But the reason we chose her was that her vision of encouraging minority women in the mathematical sciences was bold — and so needed in this society. And the fact that she'd already taken concrete steps to do this with her Infinite Possibilities Conference demonstrated the kind of leader we were looking for."

Moore is also on the board of Building Diversity in Science.

Related Links:

• Infinite Possibilities Conference
  

---

Jennifer Stimpson has a MA in chemistry. She currently teaches high school chemistry at the Yvonne A. Ewell Townview Magnet Center in Dallas. She developed a K-12 chemistry education program called "Get a KIC Out of Science!", where KIC stands for Knowledge in Chemistry.

Related Links

• Get a "KIC" Out of Science program
  
• Jennifer Stimpson at The White House Project

---

The three women met for the first time at the June conference.

"We're women, we're minorities, we're scientists, and we don't have that geeky look," says Stimpson, "so here's our message: You can be black, Hispanic, or Asian, you can wear Manolos, you can be fly, hip, and dynamic and be a scientist. When a 12-year-old thinks you're cool, that's like getting a million-dollar check."

Original Article: "Chemistry is Hot! Meet 3 Science Rock Stars" O, Nov. 2008.
List of all 80 winners.

Tags: science education, O White House Leadership Project

Teaching Science With Crafts

The National Museum of American History has a beautiful example of a 19th century quilt depicting the solar system. It was crafted by Sarah Ellen Harding Baker of Cedar County, Iowa in 1876. Baker didn't select the design simply because it's pretty:

Ellen used the quilt as a visual aid for lectures she gave on astronomy in the towns of West Branch, Moscow, and Lone Tree, Iowa. Astronomy was an acceptable interest for women in the 19th century, and was sometimes even fostered in their education.

It makes me wonder whether Baker or the children she taught had access to a telescope, and whether any of them dreamed of professionally studying the stars. Baker's story is also a reminder of the hardships of the 19th century. She died of tuberculosis in 1886 at the age of 39, leaving behind her husband and seven children.

(via label-free via CRAFTzine blog)

Tags: astronomy, quilts, Ellen Harding Baker

Our Humongous Sky and Other Topics

For some smart and interesting woman-on-woman science discussion, check out yesterday's edition of Bloggingheads.tv, where science writer Jennifer Ouellette (Cocktail Party Physics) and University of Washington Associate Professor of Astronomy Julianne Dalcanton (Cosmic Variance). They discuss the Hubble Space Telescope, astronauts, the comet named after Julianne, corpse museums, science on TV and teaching science.



They mention the following links:

• Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• Jennifer: Prime Time Science
• Julianne: Awful Hubble News
• Jennifer: Plastic People
• Jennifer: Exquisite Corpses
  

(If you can't see the embedded video, you can view and download the discussion at blogghingheads.tv)

Tags: bloggingheads.tv, Jennifer Ouellette, Julianne Dalcanto, astronomy,

Marjorie Lee Browne: mathematician and educator

Last week the James Logan High School (Union City, CA) Courier posted* an interesting article about Marjorie Lee Browne, one of the first two African-American woman to receive a doctoral degree in mathematics the United States:

Browne was born in Tennessee in 1914. Her mother died when she was only two years old, and she was raised by her stepmother, Mary Taylor Lee, and her father, Lawrence Johnson Lee. Her father, a railway postal clerk, was also a "math whiz" who shared his passion for mathematics with his children. She attended LeMoyne High School, a private Methodist school started after the Civil War to offer education for African-Americans.

According to an interview she gave shortly before her death, mathematics was a comfort to her when she was growing up:

"I always, always, always liked mathematics. As a child I was rather introverted, and as far back as I can remember I liked mathematics . . . I could do it alone."

After completing her dissertation at the University of Michigan, Browne joined the faculty at North Carolina College (now North Carolina Central University), serving as department head from 1951-1970. In fact, for 25 years she was the only instructor in the NCCU math department who had a PhD. Her profile at Biographies of Women Mathematicians notes that she not only pursued her own research, but also was able to secure funding for the university's mathematics program for secondary school teachers.

In addition to her own grants and fellowships to pursue mathematical studies, Browne received several grants to support the teaching of mathematics at North Carolina Central University. This institution became the first predominantly Black institution to be awarded an NSF Institute for secondary teachers of mathematics, a program Browne directed for 13 summers. In 1960, through her efforts, NCCU received a grant from IBM for the support of academic computing. In 1969 she obtained for her department the first Shell Grant for awards to outstanding mathematics students.

That grant from IBM brought her department one of the first computers in academic computing, almost certainly the first at a historically black college. But her devotion to education was more than just bringing in grants. She took a personal interest in teaching, and, in the last years of her life used her own money to help gifted students pursue their education in mathematics.

Despite the discrimination against both African-Americans and women in the world of mathematics, Browne received fellowships to study combinatorial topology at Cambridge University, differential topology at Columbia University, and computing and numerical analysis at UCLA.

Browne died in 1979 at the age of 65. Today there is a scholarship in her honor at NCCU for students in mathematics, and the University of Michigan Department of Mathematics hold an annual Dr. Marjorie Lee Browne Colloquium as part of the universities Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Symposium.

Additional information:

• Biographies of Women Mathematicians: Marjorie Lee Browne
• Mathematicians of the African Diaspora: Marjorie Lee Browne
• Notable Women in Mathematics @ Google Books: Marjorie Lee Browne
  

(via Terra Sigillata)

* Yes, the article is pretty much just copied and pasted from Wikipedia, but I think it's great that high school students are interested enough in the topic of women in mathematics to cover it.

Tags: Marjorie Lee Brown, mathematics

Sally Ride, Climate Change and Science Education

On July 23 Dr. Sally Ride gave the keynote address at the "Earth Then, Earth Now: Our Changing Climate" conference for educators at the NOAA Science Center in Silver Spring, Maryland. The conference is part of the 25th anniversary celebration of Ride's first spaceflight.

Watch video from the conference. I particularly recommend the Q&A about climate change and science education with Ride and Dr. Kathy Sullivan, oceanographer and first American woman to walk in space (watch wmv).

While Ride was in Maryland, Ride spoke to a group of middle-school girls.

"I had parents who encouraged me to do whatever I wanted," Ride told a group of middle-schools girls at the Maryland Science Center last week.

"And I had two teachers - women science teachers - who told me that if you are good at science in seventh grade, you will be good at science in high school and you will be good at science in college.

"They told me, 'You don't get dumber as you get older.' They helped me have confidence."

And Ride is trying to pass on that confidence to middle school students: Sally Ride Science runs science festivals across the US, featuring hands-on activities for 5th-8th graders.

Tags: Sally Ride, Kathy Sullivan, climate change, science education

Dangerous Exploration and Science

After hearing a segment about the Tinkering School on All Things Considered, I've been doing a bit more reading on it. The Tinkering School is a summer camp for kids that allows kids to build, use fire, throw spears and learn by doing.

The Tinkering School offers an exploratory curriculum designed to help kids - ages 7 to 17 - learn how to build things. By providing a collaborative environment in which to explore basic and advanced building techniques and principles, we strive to create a school where we all learn by fooling around. All activities are hands-on, supervised, and at least partly improvisational.

Grand schemes, wild ideas, crazy notions, and intuitive leaps of imagination are, of course, encouraged and fertilized.

Much of what they do looks "dangerous", at least at first glance, but it looks like a lot of fun - check out the photos and videos of the kids building a bridge.

The founder of The Tinkering School, software engineer Gever Tully, gave a talk at TED about "5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do". His philosophy is that overbearing safety regulations actually stifle creativity and has the unintended effect of raising children who never learn to safely interact with the environment around them. What struck me is how many of his suggested "5 Dangerous Things" - playing with fire, owning (and learning to use) a pocket knife, throwing a spear, deconstructing appliances - are what I think of as traditionally boys' activities. While parents may be overprotective of their children in general, it seems that boys are given more freedom to pursue those potentially dangerous kinds of exploratory activities. There's a reason why the female counterpart to The Dangerous Book for Boys is the The Daring Book for Girls (which includes activities like learning how to put your hair up with a pencil and slumber party games).

I don't think it's unrealistic to suggest that kids who are encouraged to disassemble appliances or build their own treehouse for fun are more likely to discover they are interested in engineering than kids who do not. And I think encouraging kids to explore and experiment can spark a love for science. The fact that boys are more likely to allowed and encouraged in such "dangerous" pursuits is likely one of the factors that creates the disparity in the number of boys and girls who chose to pursue science and engineering as a career. And that's what the "girls don't choose science" apologists for the gender gap are missing: career choice does not develop in a vacuum.

Anyway, I vote for more programs like the Tinkering School that promote exploration and creativity in both girls and boys.

Tags: gender gap, stereotypes, Tinkering School

Kiss My Math

Actress (and math major) Danica McKellar has a new book about math targeted to girls: Kiss My Math: showing Pre-Algebra Who's Boss. Based on the book's description, it's definitely got a girly vibe:

Stepping up not only the math, but also the sass and style, Kiss My Math will help math-phobic teenagers everywhere chill out about math, and finally “get” negative numbers, variables, absolute values, exponents, and more. Each chapter features:

• Step-by-step instruction
• Time-saving tips and tricks
• Illuminating practice problems with detailed solutions
• Real-world examples
• True stories from Danica’s own life as a student and actress

Kiss My Math also includes more fun extras--including personality quizzes, reader polls, and real-life testimonials-- ultimately revealing why pre-Algebra is easier, more relevant, and more glamorous than girls think.

Even though I don't remember finding pre-algebra particularly daunting, I sure don't remember it being glamorous either. It's hard to remember exactly what my Junior High School-self was like, but I was definitely shy and self-conscious. I suspect that adding personal quizes and boyfriend talk (*blush* *blush* would have been my response to that) would have made math class a bit uncomfortable and less appealing to me. But obviously, not every girl is like that. As Veronica at Viva La Feminista points out:

While I didn't quite like the concept of teaching "girl" math, there is a real need to make science, math & engineering more girl-friendly. Even I, the math nerd I am, zoned out each time we had to do a problem about shooting two bullets or when two rockets would meet. I'd rather spend time trying to figure out how long it would take a fish to outswim a predator. McKellar is sticking to her girly examples and well, I have to admit, I bet it works.

I like the idea of a making math more appealing to girls, as long as there is no assumption that this is an approach that would necessarily turn on every girl to the glamorous world of pre-algebra.

Here is some video of Danica McKellar talking about girls and math:

• During her appearance on GMA she talks about examples used in the book, "including how to figure out the average number of times your boyfriend texted you during the week." (There was definitely no text messaging when I was in Junior High!)
• Amazon.com video: "A girl leans to love math"
• Amazon.com video: "Math is not scary"
• Amazon.com video: "Math does not suck"
  

And if you have read the book and want to talk about the math problems, math in general, or "beauty and brains", check out McKellar's forum at MathDoesntSuck.com.

ETA: McKellar was interviewed by Ira Flatow on this week's Science Friday show.

(via Zuska)

Tags: mathematics, education, Danica McKellar

Think Science Now and Supporting Science Education

Big Think: Think Science Now is a project by pharmaceutical company Pfizer and other research organizations that video profiles 10 outstanding scientists. Once you have watched the videos (or even if you haven't), you can vote for your favorite. Pfizer will donate $1 per vote to science projects for classrooms through DonorsChoose.org.

The women scientists profiled so far:

• Sarah J. Schlesinger, associate professor at The Rockefeller University, who is working on an HIV vaccine
• Pardis Sabeti, assistant professor at Harvard University, who studies the evolution of the human genome
• Sonia Patel, pharmacologist at Pfizer
• Bonnie Bassler, professor of molecular biology at Princeton University, who works on methods to create new antimicrobial drugs
  

Note that the Think Science Now is only on week 7, so be sure to come back in a couple of weeks.

See DonorsChoose.org for more information on the programs waiting to be funded. You can also donate to the programs directly to get a special thanks.

Every donor receives an email "thank-you" message from the teacher, which is sent about a week after the project is fully funded.

In addition, if you complete a project's funding or give $100 or more, you will receive a "thank-you" package in the mail with student photos and hand-written cards; this usually arrives within 3-6 months of your donation.

(via Sandra at Discovering Biology in a Digital World)
Tags: Think Science Now, science education, Pfizer

Breaking News: Girls do just as well as boys at math

OK, so to readers of this blog, it's probably not that shocking, but a study published in today's issue of Science¹ shows that girls do just as well on standardized math tests as boys. The study was lead by University of Wisconsin psychology professor Janet Hyde, and is a follow-up to a similar study she published almost 20 years ago². That original study found that girls and boys performed equally well on math tests through middle school, with boys outperforming girls starting in high school. In the current study she shows that there is no longer any gender difference in test scores through grade 11.

But what about the best of the best? Could it be that men dominate in mathematically-based fields because there are more male math "geniuses"? Hyde did find that when you look at the 99th percentile test scores "white boys outnumbered white girls by about two to one." Aha! That means that women will never make up more than 33% of the engineers and physicists³, right? Setting aside the assumption that there is necessarily a correlation between being in the top 1% of math test takers and success as a physical scientist, what Hyde found was that the difference doesn't even hold true for all girls and boys. When test scores for students with Asian ancestry were compared, girls outnumbered boys in the 99th percentile. The results are consistent with the difference being due to cultural factors, rather than innate difference in ability.

OK, but what about college-prep level mathematics? Boys do outscore girls on the math portion of the SAT. As the Science Now article summarizes:

Another portion of the study did confirm that boys still tend to outscore girls on the mathematics section of the SAT test taken by 1.5 million students interested in attending college. In 2007, for instance, boys' scores were about 7% higher on average than girls'. But Hyde's team argues that the gap is a statistical illusion, created by the fact that more girls take the test. "You're dipping farther down into the distribution of female talent, which brings down the score," Hyde says. It's not clear that statisticians at the College Board, which produces the SAT, will agree with that explanation. But Hyde says it's good news, because it means the test isn't biased against girls.

Even if the 7% difference in average SAT test scores does accurately reflect an innate difference mathematical ability, it certainly isn't sufficient to explain the gender gap in physics and engineering.

There's a bit of discussion of the story at the Chronicle of higher education Wired Campus blog, where the comments seem to alternate between "duh, everybody knows this" and "the results don't reflect true mathematical genius"-style arguments. The Knight Science Journalism Tracker has a roundup of links of coverage in the mainstream media.

Related post: How different are the brains of women and men? Not much.

(Thanks to Abi at nanopolitan for sending me the link to the original Science paper)

1. Hyde JS et al. "Gender Similarities Characterize Math Performance" Science 321 (5888): 494-495 (2008). DOI: 10.1126/science.1160364
2. Hyde JS et al "Gender differences in mathematics performance: A meta-analysis." Psycho. Bull. 107(2): 139-155 (1990)
3. That certainly doesn't explain why only 15% of the physics PhDs and 18% of the engineering PhDs go to women. Interestingly, women earn 27% of the mathematics and statistics PhDs.

Tags: gender gap, mathematics